


mid-youth crisis

by mjolnirbreaker



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alcohol, Canon Compliant, Gen, Introspection, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 09:11:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18568318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjolnirbreaker/pseuds/mjolnirbreaker
Summary: It’s pathetic, Steve knows. It’s pathetic to think about your ex every single day for months after she leaves you and it’s pathetic to go back and forth on feeling like you deserve it. Feeling pathetic at parties was never a Steve Harrington experience until recently. There are a lot of new experiences recently.





	mid-youth crisis

The carpet in Steve’s living room is twelve by fifteen inches and, described by his mother’s guests at every function and gathering for the nine years that it’s been unrolled, really _something._

It’s mostly black to match the leather couches. When Steve was younger he played a game called Don’t Fall Into The Black Hole wherein he jumped from the couch to pillows strategically placed on the floor to the armchair and tried to never touch the rug. He was always pretty good at it until his mother came in and yelled at him for jumping on the furniture, and then he’d always startle and lose his balance and the black hole would get him. 

There are little hints of red here and there, just random shapes that he figures must count as abstract art. Two oblong shapes spaced a few inches apart kind of look like glowing red eyes, which he never liked when traversing into the kitchen into the middle of night. 

Steve hates this rug. It’s not comfortable in the slightest, first of all. He’d tried sleeping on it once because his parents had been fighting and when they fight he finds it hard to fall asleep (not because it’s particularly heart-wrenching anymore but because it’s just fucking loud) and so he’d migrated downstairs, found the couches too stiff, and then promptly laid on the rug and discovered that it’s actually scratchy as hell and hard as concrete. The real problem though is that despite what the women with thousand-dollar bracelets sliding down their wrist every time they take a sip of wine might think, the thing is _ugly._ So ugly that he can’t believe he grew up getting hollered at for walking on it with his shoes on or drinking soda in its general vicinity. The funny thing is that he never even realized how disgustingly ugly it really is until someone told him. 

“It’s...interesting.” Is actually what Barbara Holland had actually said, because she was too nice to be honest. 

The obvious disdain in her expression when she’d looked down at it that night had made him actually look at the thing objectively and realize that, yeah, it’s ugly. Ugly as fuck. Then Barbara Holland died in his swimming pool about forty-five minutes later and now when Steve looks at the rug he thinks the red looks too much like blood. 

Someone just spilled beer on one of the red eyes. Usually when Steve throws parties, he carefully rolls the rug up and stashes it in the laundry room. Right now though, much like the party in general, Steve can’t bring himself to care all that much. 

“Oh shit, dude, sorry.” Someone he doesn’t know says, making a sweeping gesture with their arm in the direction of the kitchen and allowing more beer to slosh over the rim of his cup in the process. “I c’n get a like, a uh, a paper napk’n thing.”

Steve is alarmed at how drunk this guy is because it’s only ten and usually it takes until about midnight for people to start slurring this bad. At some point since hanging out with middle-schoolers, Steve has begun feeling stressed rather than excited at the prospect of gallons of alcohol being consumed in his house. Or, like, anywhere. Don’t these dumbasses know that their town is a hotbed for paranormal secret-government-lab disasters? Don’t they know you can’t swing a bat effectively if you’re plastered?

“Don’t bother.” Steve tells the guy. 

“Cool.” 

“Yeah.” 

These parties are not entertaining anymore. Maybe they never were and Steve was just always drunk. He’d only thrown this one because people expected him to (officially voted the Hawkins High class of ‘85 superlative of best hair but _un_ officially voted best at throwing parties so it’s fitting that he should throw the ultimate graduation rager) and in some part of his brain he’s hoping Nancy will come. He knows she won’t, and if she does it’ll be with Jonathan who Steve has a tentative friendship with now but he hates parties and the whole time he’ll just be looking around all apprehensively as if just looking at the solo cups littered around the living room will give him alcohol poisoning. 

It’s pathetic, Steve knows. It’s pathetic to think about your ex every single day for months after she leaves you and it’s pathetic to go back and forth on feeling like you deserve it. Feeling pathetic at parties was never a Steve Harrington experience until recently. There are a lot of new experiences recently. 

Steve forces himself to get up and look for something to do. There’s beer pong in the dining room but that involves drinking. The pool is being jumped into but even looking at the pool tends to make him nauseas. People are dancing throughout the entire first floor but it’s currently a slow song and there’s no one he wants to do that with. 

He’s about to suck it up and go out back when Bella Weston stumbles past him in the urgent kind of way that makes him turn around. 

“Hey, you good?” He tries asking her, but her hand is over her mouth so he rules that out and just sort of guides her down the hall and to the bathroom. 

Steve doesn’t have any hair ties, so he just ends up with long black curls in both hands. He can feel the hairspray, which either means she’s using the wrong brand or she’s using too much of the right brand. He’s pretty sure Bella is a sophomore, so she still has plenty of time to be the female successor to his superlative. She’ll have to get better at holding her alcohol if she wants to earn the other, though. 

“Oh my God this is humiliating.” She mumbles when she’s done. With a thud she lets her head fall back against the wall while Steve flushes the toilet with the toe of his sneaker. 

“Don’t worry.” He says while he holds one of his mother’s cherry-red washcloths under the sink. “You actually made it behind a closed door so you’ve already got a leg up on like, everyone. Here wash your mouth.”

She accepts the cloth and looks up at him with wide eyes. Her purple eyeshadow is smudged on her left eye. “You won’t tell Billy, right?”

Steve sighs. Either she’s somehow the only person in school who doesn’t know about Billy and Steve’s “rivalry” (which isn’t the word he’d use) or she’s so drunk that she can’t remember. Maybe she doesn’t even know who Steve is. That’s okay, though. He’s pretty unrecognizable these days. 

“I won’t tell Billy.” Only now does she relax and wipe her mouth. “I think I should drive you home.”

“Kay.” 

It takes a minute to get her up off the bathroom floor, then another two to find her shoes in the backyard, then one more to help her wobble through the living room. On their way, someone steps in front of them and tries to inform Steve that there’s a pizza laying facedown on the rug. Steve shrugs and keeps walking. 

“103 Cherrywood Lane.” She informs him before promptly slumping down in the passenger seat and shutting her eyes. 

Steve is familiar with Cherrywood because it’s only one street over from the Byers’ place. He turns on the radio to drown out how suffocatingly awkward the ride is and pretends that he’s just on his way to pick Will up for the arcade instead of delivering a drunk stranger who’s in love with the biggest asshole he knows to her house. When he pulls into her driveway and opens her door, he takes a shot in the dark. 

“You should stay away from Billy Hargrove.” He says. 

She pushes him away in uncoordinated, sloppy annoyance and hauls herself out of the car by herself. “You _wish_.” 

So he leans against the car and watches her stagger up to the front door, where she fumbles in her purse for at least a full minute before finally getting the door open and disappearing. Unless she attends graduation, Steve will never see this girl again. He just hopes Billy never sees her again either. 

Steve sits in his car and listens to Creedence Clearwater Revival, fully intending to start the car and turn left after the end of Cherrywood and returning to his own party to make sure no one dies on his property or steals shit or ruins the goddamn rug any more than it’s been ruined. 

Instead, he turns right and knocks on the Byers’ door two minutes later. Everything is right in the world again when Will Byers answers the door and enthusiastically grins up at him. 

“I thought you had a party?” Will asks as they round the corner to the living room. Steve can’t answer him because there’s the expected explosion of yelling from the kids when they see him, plus the greeting from Joyce when she pokes her head out of the kitchen and offers him the leftovers from dinner, which he gladly accepts because party food is always disgusting. 

“It was boring.” Steve shrugs once he has a plate of reheated lasagna. Max and Dustin naturally scoot apart to make room for him around the coffee table. It’s refreshing to see a coffee table covered in their little character papers and billions of colored dice rather than the solo cups and piles of weed that were on his. “And there were no like, wizards or whatever.”

 _“Mages.”_ Mike corrects pointedly. 

“Yeah none of those either.” He smirks around his fork when Mike rolls his eyes. “So what’s up? Still doing the cave puzzle?”

“No, Dustin figured that out.” Will informs him.

“That’s an undersell on our team dynamic.” Lucas complains.

“I carried you!” Dustin exclaims. 

“We’re talking to a shopkeeper.” El says, giving him a hopeful look from across the table. He knows what’s coming. “Can you do the thing?”

“Hmm.” Steve stretches his legs out under the table and pretends to agonize over the decision. “What’s the accent?” 

“Aim for Scottish.” Mike says.

“So like, aye mateys and stuff like that?”

The kids laugh so hard that Steve is glad they aren’t eating dinner still. Being such a hit with the kids is a choking hazard, he’s discovered. The truth is that this is already a million times more fun than the party still going on at his house, and even if he does have to prevent one of them from choking or stabbing each other over questionable Dungeons and Dragons decisions or whatever, it’s still better than preventing strangers from getting alcohol poisoning. 

Not to mention the weird warm feeling in Steve’s chest when these kids are around. He leans back on his palms and digs his fingers into soft, white shag carpet.

**Author's Note:**

> whew i didnt proofread this at all so im sorry if there are typos!!! i just love my man steve and the song jackie and wilson by hozier (where the title comes from) made me wanna write this >:)
> 
> thank u as always to em my angel for reading this and hyping me tf up i love u!!
> 
> my tumblr is @bi-harrington if u wanna chat


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